‘If it were true it would be cosmic child abuse’ I’ve heard in and outside Christian circles in response to the understanding of God’s love shown in the Cross.
The idea of God willing his Son to suffer and die to make things right in the world raises more questions for some people than living agnostic with the wrongs.
That there is no official doctrine of atonement - how God and humanity are made one in Christ - makes for another complication. So does the simplification of thinking on the Cross to throw a line to Christian seekers not to mention poetic licence employed in hymns about the passion of Christ.
Evangelical songwriter Stuart Townend weathered criticism for these lines in his hymn In Christ Alone: ‘on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied’. At the other side of the Christian spectrum this phrase in a Roman Catholic prayer has detractors: ‘Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your Church and… the sacrificial Victim by whose death you willed to reconcile us to yourself’. The same talk of God satisfying justice through sacrificing his Son is found in the middle of the Christian spectrum in an Anglican text, the Book of Common Prayer, which speaks of Christ’s ‘full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world’.
Where is God’s love in the suffering of Jesus? When the hymn speaks of ‘the wrath of God being satisfied’ by Christ’s suffering on our behalf it is a wrath against sin not against his Son.
It is hate, not wrath, which is the opposite to love, something taught us in family life.
A mother had a son she loved very deeply. He was a tearaway and always let her down. One day he commits a shameful act and is filled with guilt at his sin. How does that mother feel at the evil which has gripped her dearest one? What agonies that mother bears at the shame her son has brought upon himself holding wrath against the wrongdoing. The mother suffers far more than her son who is not holy or loving enough to register the evil.
In the suffering and death of Christ God’s heart breaks for us. How can God look into my soul and be my friend? The answer is he can and he will have fellowship with me but that fellowship has come at a price and that price was paid in the loving initiative of the Cross which traces back through Bethlehem into the very heart of God.
We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.
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